"And the thief, male and female: cut off the hands of both, as a recompense for what they have earned, and a punishment exemplary from Allah" (Qur'an 5:38)
"There's really no such thing as just Sharia, it's not one monolithic Continuum - Sharia is understood in thousands of different ways over the 1,500 years in which multiple and competing schools of law have tried to construct some kind of civic penal and family law code that would abide by Islamic values and principles, it's understood in many different ways..." -- Reza Aslan
And yet whenever we see Sharia implemented, it looks the same. Now, why is that?
"In northern Mali, Islamists’ attacks against civilians grow more brutal," by Sudarsan Raghavan for the Washington Post, December 11 (thanks to Jamal):
SEGOU, Mali — On a sweltering afternoon, Islamist police officers dragged Fatima Al Hassan out of her house in the fabled city of Timbuktu. They beat her up, shoved her into a white pickup truck and drove her to their headquarters. She was locked up in a jail as she awaited her sentence: 100 lashes with an electrical cord.“Why are you doing this?” she recalled asking.
Hassan was being punished for giving water to a male visitor....
“The people are losing all hope,” said Sadou Diallo, a former mayor of the northern city of Gao. “For the past eight months, they have lived without any government, without any actions taken against the Islamists. Now the Islamists feel they can do anything to the people.”
Refugees fleeing the north are now bringing stories that are darker than those recounted in interviews from this summer. Although their experiences cannot be independently verified — because the Islamists have threatened to kill or kidnap Westerners who visit — U.N. officials and human rights activists say that they have heard similar reports of horrific abuses and that some may amount to war crimes.
The refugees say the Islamists are raping and forcibly marrying women, and recruiting children for armed conflict. Social interaction deemed an affront to their interpretation of Islam is zealously punished through Islamic courts and a police force that has become more systematic and inflexible, human rights activists and local officials say.
Two weeks ago, the Islamists publicly whipped three couples 100 times each in Timbuktu for not being married, human rights activists said.
The Islamist police had spotted Hassan giving water to a male visitor at her house last month. Hassan’s brother knew an Islamist commander and pleaded for mercy. After spending 18 hours in jail, she was set free with a warning. The next day, she fled here to Segou, a town in southern Mali that has taken in thousands of the displaced, mostly women and children.
It was fortunate, Hassan said, that she was handing the glass to her friend out on the veranda. “If they had found me with him near the bedroom, they would have shot us both on the spot,” she said.
With organization, ‘abuse’
Radical Islamists have transformed vast stretches of desert in the north into an enclave for al-Qaeda militants and other jihadists. They have imposed a hard-edged brand of sharia law, echoing Afghanistan’s Taliban movement, in this West African country where moderate Islam has thrived for centuries....
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Allah is very pleased.